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> + health insurance

In the US at least, this immediately makes it not cheap

Not if your income really only covers coffee + room + board. For example, a 40-year-old in California making $25K/year can get a plan on the ACA exchange for $13/mo.

Now do it for an applied physicist with a family and a mortgage!

In theory, the work I do sits in that valley of death between where the government funds uncertain things at a $1e5-$5e6 level and where private capital funds things with more certainty at the $1e7-$5e7 level. It’s easy to burn a lot of labor and equipment on dead ends before you know something will scale.

Yes, mathematicians don’t have families.